Inspiration comes from the strangest of places. In the case of the brilliant new SBS series The Airport Chaplain, it arrived in the back seat of an Uber. Or, to be precise, it departed, taking Jude Troy’s most vital belongings with it.

It was August 2023 and Troy – the Irish-born producer whose company Wooden Horse (co-founded with Richard Finlayson, former head of television at the ABC) has made The Other Guy, Stuff the British Stole and The Clearing – was heading back to Sydney after the first public screening of her show Mother and Son at Melbourne’s ACMI.

“I was really desperate to get home, distracted, running late as always for a plane,” she says. “I jumped out of the Uber, turned around, and the car disappeared into the late afternoon sun, taking my bag, my laptop, my phone, everything.”

She stood on the footpath for a couple of minutes waiting for it to turn around “but it never came back”. Growing increasingly frantic, she tried to get assistance from Uber’s offshore “help” line using phones borrowed from strangers, and realised how few phone numbers we commit to memory these days.

Finally, a federal police officer, about to race off to collect her kids after school, came to the rescue. “She said, ‘I’m going to introduce you to a gentleman called Martin, and he’ll look after you.’”

Martyn Scrimshaw, the chaplain at Melbourne Airport, did exactly that. But first, he led Troy on what she calls a “two-hour, 25,000-step adventure deep into the bowels of the airport, through security, into the upper echelons of what is a class system in the airport”.

He told her stories “of people dying on aeroplanes, which happens every week; of the woman who comes to the airport every day and thinks she’s being watched by MI5; the young girl who’s camping on the roof of the airport because she’s been abused; the Russian who arrived with an empty suitcase and has literally no idea where to go. Story after story – the absurd, the ridiculous the emotional – and this man, Martyn Scrimshaw, is there to support those people and the workers in the canteens, in security, in the taxi ranks, the terminal manager and the check-in staff. So many people seek his counsel, it’s quite extraordinary.”

By 9pm, Troy was on a flight home, her retrieved bag beside her, in the business class seat for which Scrimshaw contrived an upgrade. “And next morning, I rang my co-pilot [writer Elise McCredie] and told her this story, and she was like, ‘We’re making a TV show.’”

Troy tells me all this in an excited jumble – I suspect frantic is, in fact, her default mode – while we sit at a plastic table beneath a temporary marquee in a carpark at Flemington Racecourse.

We’re not here for the horses. We’re here for the hustle and bustle of Melbourne International Airport, re-created with cunning sleight-of-hand in the Members Stand. (For obvious reasons, filming the series at the airport was impractical.)

Watching Hugo Weaving as the fictional Tobias Wallace, it’s easy to see why McCredie was as inspired by the promise as Troy. It’s fast-paced, dynamic, full of drama and comedy and generosity and tension, and all neatly resolved (more or less) within a half-hour (SBS has commissioned eight episodes in this first season; the show’s creators hope there will be many more to come).

McCredie met the real-life airport chaplain, too, spending several days following him around the airport, also wearing a hi-vis vest emblazoned with the words “Airport chaplain”. This functions – at least when accompanied by the man himself – as a kind of access-all-areas pass.

“He told me it’s the best job in the world because every day he doesn’t know what’s going to happen,” she says. “He meets different people. He’s a problem solver, he gets to laugh and be joyful, but then he also helps people in really dark places. And so for a series, it just had everything for me as a writer.”

The rollcall of characters and micro-dramas provides endless short-term storylines, but a series needs a continuing narrative to make it more than just a collection of vignettes. This is where Shabana Azeez lands.

The 28-year-old from Adelaide, who had plugged away in indie fare for seven years before The Pitt catapulted her to fame last year, plays new terminal manager Mira Ansari-Cole, an MBA-toting corporate drone whose only loyalty is to the bottom line. Virtually her first interaction with Tobias is to offer him a redundancy. Things only get worse from there.

Mira – a single mother, an outsider (she’s come to Australia via the UK and Hong Kong), and not especially gifted with interpersonal skills – is at first glance the polar opposite of Tobias. Not just a formidable foe, she’s also someone fighting her own battle for acceptance in a corporate structure that regards people as headcounts on a spreadsheet.

“This show starts with Tobias’ perspective and it slowly shifts to a more holistic view of the airport,” says Azeez. The challenge is to make Mira, a “complicated” character, relatable despite the lack of obvious likeability.

“There’s something about how women in positions of power gain power, how they keep power, and how hard it is for women to be likeable when they have power,” says Azeez, adding “we’re really happy to build women up to tear them down”.

Mira has been brought into “an impossible position”, she says. “Her predecessor has made some choices that have left the airport compromised, and she’s coming into a shitshow, frankly, tasked with fixing it.

“And nobody likes her because she’s not trading on likeability or beauty or any of these things that historically have been the ways women get power. She’s trading on competence, and a lot of people are getting in the way of her doing her job. So that raises a lot of tension and drama in the workplace.”

Azeez is “very, very excited by the idea of playing young women who are complicated. I really want my career to be me going into bat for young women – until I’m not a young woman any more; you know, there’s a real timeline on that – so I’m grateful to have this opportunity now. I think it’s a really political show, a socially aware show, and it’s very complex and layered.”

Azeez’s sister, two years older, works in management, and she tapped her for insights. “She’s also a psychologist, so she’s very useful for every role, ever.” She also tapped friends with kids for insights into juggling work and parenting. And she drew on her own experience of being a child of migrants – her parents were born and raised in Fiji – for that aspect of Mira’s backstory.

“For me, acting is the perfect job in terms of the work of it,” Azeez says. “I love to research, I love to interview people, I love to read. I’m quite obsessive, and I can get hyper-fixated on things. The research is my favourite, and then flow state – performance is flow state when it’s going well.”

Azeez never studied drama, not at school – “I did maths” – or university. “My parents were like, ‘Absolutely over our dead bodies.’ Lawyer, doctor, accountant: those were the options.”

They consented to her trying for one drama school, though, on the basis that if she didn’t get in they would never have to hear about this ridiculous acting thing again. “And I crashed my car on the way to the audition – it was horrible – and I just fumbled the whole thing.”

She did an arts degree, with the aim of doing something acting-adjacent, and landed a job in arts administration. Her boss could tell her heart wasn’t in it though, and when Azeez confessed all she really wanted to do was act, the boss took action.

“Within an hour, she got me an audition, and I booked it, and that tape got sent around to a bunch of directors, because it’s Adelaide,” she says. Soon, she was cast in indie shorts, and eventually features. “Adelaide being Adelaide is why I have a career,” she says. “Just, like, seven people being really nice to me.”

Talent and brains may have something to do with it – and ambition, too. Azeez has no shortage of that.

“I shadow every director on The Pitt, I shadow pre-production on The Pitt, I’m going to shadow post-production on season three,” she says. “I want to make my own stuff, but because I didn’t train, I want to know my business before I get into that. I think it’s important not to squander opportunities by not knowing.”

Little chance of that, you suspect. With The Airport Chaplain adding to her rapidly growing resume, Shabana Azeez is well and truly flying.

The Airport Chaplain (episodes 1-3) premieres at MIFF this weekend; details: miff.com.au. The series premieres at 8.30pm on Wednesday, August 26, on SBS and SBS On Demand.

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